Long live the Adolf Hitler or did he die at the end of World War II? He committed suicide with revolver inside his shelter at Berlin, on April 30, 1945, a few hours before the German city of Soviets or managed to escape to the South American side, making a "second", secret life in Argentina; Where the historical truth ends and where the conspiracy theories (and the lie)?
One thing is for sure: the story of Hitler is a fascinating story, almost 75 years later as one of the most famous of these theories, the Führer and his companion, Eva Brown did not commit suicide but fled to Argentina, which eventually became the refuge of many high-ranking fugitives from the Nazi regime, including Joseph Mengele and Adolf Eichmann.
Hitler's supposed flight to South America is the subject of countless books, even an extremely popular (albeit historically incomplete) TV series, "Chasing Hitler," which aired on the History Channel from 2015 to 2018.
The British historian Sir Richard Evans, however, as one of the most expert on the subject, in an extensive his article in the New Statesman, that both this series and most of the books that reproduce this theory (or most others, equally outrageous), they are completely ignorant of the almost unshakable evidence of Hitler's death and base their narratives on "hints, suspicions and fabrications."
In his new book, The Hitler Conspiracies, Evans tries to dispel one by one these "fantasy theories," as he describes them.
"The 'evidence' of Hitler's alleged survival collapses like a tower of playing cards once it has been thoroughly examined," he said, adding that "the submarines that allegedly transported Hitler and his comrades to Argentina were or that they had carried incredible loads such as cigarette cartons - at a time when Hitler had never smoked or allowed smoking in front of him. The "evidence" from third party reports proves to have been invented by. Imaginary. The FBI was obliged to investigate many such stories, but in any case concluded that they were untrue. Many of Hitler's alleged "views" are based on a simple and unsupported reputation - the respondent's mother or grandfather remembered seeing someone who looked like Hitler. There is also the outrageous claim of an alleged eyewitness who said he had seen Hitler in an Argentine town in 1953 “wearing huge boots and selling herbs from house to house on a women's bicycle "".
Reports of Hitler's so-called "second life" in Argentina betray an impressive ignorance of the Führer literature, Evans notes, citing as an example: "An elderly Argentine, Catalina Gomerro, in Gray Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler ”(Gray Wolf: Hitler's Escape), said he had worked in a house where he was preparing meals for a mysterious German visitor who was not allowed to see him. "And since these were 'typical German' foods, such as sausage, ham and cabbage, it is not possible, it must have been Hitler himself," as if there were no other Germans in the country at the time.
"The historian therefore chooses to publish this theory, although It was well known that Hitler was a strict vegetarian. Another book, Hunting Hitler, claims that "all these stories we have about the circumstances of Hitler's death in his shelter can not be substantiated." On the contrary: "There is a great deal of thorough research to support such a thing, simply that none of the bearers of these theories has sat down to read it carefully," Evans argues.
Evans first refutes the conspiracy theories cited in The Last Days of Hitler, published in 1947, where Oxford University historian Hugh Trevor-Roper presented the results of his research while working for the British intelligence service.
The historian located eyewitnesses who were with Hitler in his shelter. Those German soldiers he could not communicate with because he was being held by the Soviets, the same prisoners then spoke to the Soviets, who drafted their own report, which confirmed his main findings.
Of course, there are Evidence collected by a Bavarian court in the 1950s for the official issuance of a death certificate for Hitler, which was finally signed in 1956.
Members of Hitler's entourage who were with him at the bunker until the end, especially his personal assistants Heinz Linge and Otto Gunske, who carried the bodies of Hitler and Brown from the shelter to the Reich chancellery's garden, included them with benzine. and burned them, conveyed this story. So did Hitler's personal secretaries, who were with him until the end.
Finally, there is the physical evidence of Hitler's teeth, which were found by the dental technicians who made them.
Beyond the Führer's alleged escape to South America, in his book Evans deconstructs three more of the most well-known conspiracy theories concerning the Nazis:
Initially, the "Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion", a "labyrinthine, chaotic and incoherent" text dating back to the beginning of the last century and supposedly presenting a plan of the Jews aimed at world domination.
Then, him myth of the "back knife" (German "Dolchstoßlegende"), according to which Germany's defeat in World War I was due not to the military superiority of the Allied Powers but to the betrayal of the revolutionary socialists on the country's internal front, which overthrew the German monarchy revolution of 1918-19: for example, conservatives and nationalists have pointed out that in November 1918, when Germany capitulated, there was not a single Allied soldier in its territory.
And third, the claim that fire in the Reichstag in February 1933 it was provoked by the Nazis themselves, to use it as a pretext for the future violation of the civil liberties of German citizens.
As for the Reichstag arson, in fact the only arsonist was a young Dutchman, Marinus van der Lube, and the rulers took the opportunity to present the fire as a "communist conspiracy".
"A common element of all these conspiracy theories is that they are based on rumors and distortions of facts, and all those who spread them either deliberately ignore or reject the unshakable evidence brought to light by professional historians," Evans said meaningfully.
And of course, most importantly, there is one complete absence of genuine, primary evidence of Hitler's rescue and escape. There is not a single photograph of him after 1945, nor a video, although his alleged partner, Brown, was a professional photographer who used to shoot short films of their life together in Bavaria before and during World War II. of war.
All the alleged photos of Hitler in Argentina are fake, or a digitally modified image of actor Bruno Ganz playing him in "The Fall" to an image of an old man with a mustache lying in an armchair, which later turned out to be one of a series of photographs of British nursing home inmates!
Absolutely no one allegedly helped Hitler, either in Germany or Argentina, was ever identified and spoke publicly about it. Anyone who knew Hitler personally never expressed the slightest doubt that he had actually committed suicide in 1945.
In addition, the Führer himself had said that he would commit suicide if he lost the war. It is impossible to imagine that the pro-war and almost semi-insane Hitler could indeed live in peace in an Argentine city, having given up any ambitions to establish German world domination - and especially when other Nazis who really fled to the South , like Adolf Eichmann, spent much of their time planning (completely unrealistic) plans for their triumphant return to Germany.
In the most outrageous and almost… science fiction of these theories, Hitler's escape was achieved by… non-terrestrial means such as magic or occultism. It is, really, one wonders.
"Conspiracy theories are still obsolete, mainly because they manage to reduce 'the enigmatic complexity of politics and society to a simple formula that everyone can understand,'" Evans concludes meaningfully.